Well I did find out what part of my problem was over this weekend. I had a lot more time to listen at louder volumes and still felt that there was a lack of energy, transients, and color to the sound versus the Nova. At a little over 200 hours now I didn’t feel I should be hearing these things, especially since the Nova was so impressive relatively straight out of the box.
The Nova was so fantastic on bass, particularly “real” electric bass in that 40-60Hz area. So much so that I have added a lot of Marcus Miller, Vic Wooten, etc to my playlist over the past year, And this is an area where the SN3 seemed to be a lot less dynamic even at higher volumes. Just sounded SMALLER and less “in the room” than on the Nova.
I listened to a few songs I know really well yesterday and today at about 90-100dB+ and just was not happy. Marcus Miller - Higher Ground… the horns and organs on this song would just erupt like flames from the speakers with the Nova. The tight bass rattles your teeth and you can hear the tactile wound bass strings on the neck of the bass guitar. With the SN3, there seemed to be no excitement in the horns and organs,. The bass sounded so small and frequency range seemed compressed.
Another track - “US 41” from Tom Petty & The Heartbreaker’s Mojo album; starts out with a simple acoustic guitar strumming and Petty’s vocal is EQ’d in a “radio” effect. But then the whole band kicks in and it will just floor you, like a hammer swing out of nowhere… On the SN3, the acoustic guitar sounds fuller and more realistic but then when the bass, drums, guitars, and harmonica swing into the mix again sounding small and not exciting, almost like a grey veil over the mix versus what I’ve been used to.
Finally one song I know better than maybe any other song, “Standing on the Corner of the 3rd World” by Tears for Fears, a showcase for Pino Palladino’s fretless bass work, with runs and harmonics throughout the entire song - but also with tons of atmosphere, Fairlight samples, handclaps, chimes and Manu Katche doing some amazing percussion work from very distant brush work on the snare to explosive tom fills out of nowhere. All that detail seemed to be covered in a bit of a background haze, with Pino’s harmonics staying very 2 dimensional. At the end there is a massive bass riff that is doubled with a fuzzy synth bass that - on the Nova, which is the first time I ever heard this detail - is very subtle but changes the whole feel of that riff. The doubled synth bass was barely audible even at high volume level (close to 10 o’clock on the SN3 volume).
This has turned into a long post but the bottom line is that I went back to what was the ONLY thing different between the Nova and the NDX2/SN3 and that was the Transparent cabling. I was using the Transparent DIN cable between the NDX2 AND SN3. BUT I had also gotten some new Transparent Super speaker cables as part of the deal which were replacing my trusty Triode Wire Labs speaker cables.
Both the DIN cable and the Super speaker cables have these giant egg crate-sized network boxes on the cables, I believe to reduce noise. However I suspected that they may have been contributing to the dull energy and lack of spark and snap in the songs I knew very well.
So I replaced the Transparent DIN with the stock Naim DIN and swapped out the Triode Wire Lab cables and YES, there was the snap and crackle of transients of horns and organs and snare hits and the bite of the bass guitar back again, and the improvements of the SN3 over the Nova are now able to stand out much more clearly. I think the Transparent network stuff may have just been overkill on the Naim gear. Also the Triode Wire Labs speaker cables are an excellent match with my Volti Rivals (the owners of both companies work together on synergy between the cabling in the crossovers etc of the Volti speakers) so I think that a high current amp like the Naim is better matched with the TWL cables than the Transparent cables.
Anyway that’s my epic observation at 200 hours. Having returned to the TWL cables and stock Naim DIN I am much happier with the sound, that grey miasma is gone for the most part. There are still some areas of the NDX2/SN3 I would like to see continued improvement on over the next few weeks of break-in. But I am a lot more confident now than I was 48 hours ago, when I was at a point where I just didn’t really feel like listening much because of the above stated issues.
So onward and upward.
